We are ashamed. We turn away. The calm acceptance in the face of the natives forces us to close the book, and drop it into my bag. But that is not enough. We search for something, anything, to carry us into a safer narrative.
Then we recognize, with distaste, both the turtle-necked figure sprawled at the fireside, and the fleshy publican; his eyelids stroked with kingfisher blue ultima, his lips violet, above small rabbit-sharp teeth. They are the recorders and violators of the myth of the unsolved serial murders. They convert that slaughter into a brotherhood of remembrance. They honour the imagined (and nicknamed) psychopath who brought the four of them together as the ‘Connoisseurs of Crime’. Errlund, Bobby Younger, Nick Hywood, Sgt Roughdew: the philosopher, the publican, the journalist, and the keeper of the Black Museum.
Errlund was boring his friends with the latest anecdote dug out by his researchers from the Bishopsgate Institute. He had the reputation of never having actually to write a single word of any of his books. ‘He was doing cut-ups when William Burroughs was still getting his kicks from dropping aspirin into Coca-Cola,’ Hywood said of him. ‘He’s the first of the Post Moderns. The ultimate technician of disinterested commercialism.’
‘One of the pleasure-seekers on the Princess Alice — or so she claimed — was “Long Liz”, the Ripper’s third victim,’ Errlund began. ‘She was perfectly respectable then, dolled up for the excursion; three layers of petticoat, and no drawers. Petite bourgeoise. Sheerness, North Woolwich. Can you hear the band out there, midstream, hacking away at “Nancy Lee”? Cockney hordes packed into the saloon; bawling, shoving, belching stout, dressed to the nines. Nothing changes. A few “commercials”, tradesmen with their popsies, fathers feeding misinformation to their brats on the upper foredeck. Beneath them, the great wheels were churning, bringing her about. On the bridge a seaman screams, “My God, Captain, that man is starboarding his helm!” And the Bywell Castle, an iron-screw steamer, comes straight on them. “Thin as eggshell”, the Alice breaks up directly. Singing becomes screaming. They were in the water. The idlers on the river wall could see the light die in their eyes. They were only yards from the shore. Their fingers clawing without purchase at the cold tide. Layers of muslin belling into strange shapes, getting heavier, wrapping them in cement.’
‘And you suggest,’ said Roughdew, hoping to edit a wearisome exposition, ‘that this experience launched “Long Liz” on the fatal phase of her career? She felt somehow that she did not deserve to survive? She was looking, ever after, for a second chance to die?’
‘She had been escorted.’ Errlund was not so easily diverted. ‘Her husband, and her two dear ones. She would not give them up. She snatched at a rope trailed from a small craft. It was already full and low in the water. The baby was dragged from her arms by the undertow. A man climbed on to her back, using her like a ladder, kicking for dear life. She lost her front teeth. But she held to the rope. Ropes were threaded all over the river, a great net of holes. Ropes and lanterns. A grim trawl. She was two hours in the water. They brought her off, finally; got her ashore. Greenwich. Horse-blanket, brandy, a complimentary ticket from the London and Blackwall Railway. Before the stars were out, she was back in her lodgings. It might never have happened.’
‘Amen!’ muttered Hywood.
Errlund plunged on, intoxicated by his own rhetoric. ‘But that was her story, the drowning; that was her justification. Small ghosts accompanied her into every public house in Whitechapel. They did for Michael Kidney, a dockside labourer she was living with. “I couldn’t share a pillow,” he said, “with two dead angels.” The lies that Liz told became the truth of it. Her single encounter with the crush and weight of water, the overwhelming force of the river, carried her away. Spindrift. She drank in revenge. Diluted the Thames with gin. Until that night when, at last, she went with a “wrong-un”; up from Cable Street, factory gateway. She was split open, severed from the phantoms she could not bring to term. The victim of a monster she could exploit, neither for gain nor sympathy.’
‘Very pretty,’ said Hywood, ‘but what was the fate of the surrogate Ripper, the Bywell Castle?’
Errlund made a show of checking his papers. ‘She left Alexandria,’ he said, ‘with a cargo of linen, bound for Tilbury — and was never seen again. There were rumours that she’d rounded Cape Corvoeris. And then, nothing. Off the map, lost, gone to Atlantis. She’d served her purpose. You go downstream with impunity only once. If you get safely past Blythe Sands, you’re in a different story.’
X
The hill was smoking: it seemed to have been shelled by some infernal ordnance. ‘I am walking into hell,’ thought Arthur Singleton. The trees were a sham. Elizabethan veterans: hollow, dry as chalk, held upright by ties and staves. There had been some unimportant tragedy. A mistake, an accident. Pieces of smouldering black cloth were caught on the bushes. The air was burnt and sour. Fragments of bone were trodden into the earth.
Arthur walked between the umpires. As they walked, they dropped pebbles into his pockets. One pebble, he surmised, for each run scored; for every stroke of his life.
They cut directly through the contours of the maze, did not meander, or pace out the mystery. They snapped the invisible strings, plunging down towards the dance of light that flickered so transiently on the water. They were reading his confession to him. They told him the things he had done. The letter was placed next to his heart.
Now Arthur saw the raised spear of a white church between the twin domes of the hospital. There were masts and ladders. Courtyards, narrow passageways. Stone steps, green with algae.
He paddled carefully out from the dark and narrow beach, until he was moving freely. And without effort. The mud did not settle on his white trousers. He slid. The steep gradient went away from him. He drifted. He opened his arms. The water flowed into his veins. He crossed over.
XI
Bobby Younger sat in the back of the curtained limousine between two officials. The keeper of the Black Museum had tapped him, sliced his reverie, asked him to step outside: some gentlemen wanted a word. Then Bobby was squeezed. He was sweated, cold. Photographs confronted him that might once have provoked a private pleasure, but were now contextualized into raw fear. Rough, shirtless boys pouted: he was accused by every mark that he could identify. Old letters, written in heat, without thought, were sealed in pouches of plastic — like rare literary holographs. There were documents, typed in blue ink, defaced with official stamps. There were reports from West Africa; facts and fictions. Duplicates, invoices, VAT returns, sworn statements. The junkman had rambled like a speed-freak. Bobby’s unwritten autobiography had been violently sub-edited, ghosted by professionals: it was offered to the world in instalments of lurid sensation. The Tilbury Group was defaced into the Wild Bunch. Bobby had been nominated, and would now oblige. Always. And for ever.
He had been shadowed and eavesdropped — as we are all eavesdropped — and now he was put to use. He would serve. Or he would cease to be. His London days were a scrapbook to barter; but Bobby himself was no longer credible. His parking space at the studios had already been requisitioned. He would take the offered advance and step westwards. A bungalow on the edge of a golf course. He would speak only in quotations. He would disappear from view. Confessions would be supplied; private papers, forgeries. The Black Museum was at his disposal. He would shape an account of the murders that would point the finger where the finger should be pointed. He was ‘on the firm’.